


Shorelines

by Prevalent_Masters



Category: The Old Guard (Comics), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, BAMF Quynh | Noriko, Canon-Typical Character Death, F/F, F/M, Going on a life affirming road trip to find and kill the family that abandoned you, Immortal Wives Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Quynh | Noriko-centric, Recovery, Trauma, and then get back with your wife
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-28
Updated: 2021-01-04
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:54:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 20,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27239881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prevalent_Masters/pseuds/Prevalent_Masters
Summary: She will find them. She is pitiful right now, and weak. She has never before been weak, not in her entire life, and she’d rather be dead than pitiful. Actually, at this point, she’d rather be dead than a lot of things, but she isn’t. She’s here. She's alive, and she's been alive for thousands of years, and she will not let that iron coffin and the abandonment of her family overpower her. She is out of the water now. She refuses to drown.Quỳnh comes up for air, comes back to life, and comes home. It just takes her a little while to get there.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 87
Kudos: 269





	1. bless me before i sleep

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this the night I saw the movie for the first time and have been toying around with it ever since. These characters are still living in my head rent free four months later.
> 
> Title and chapter headings come from "Bridge Through My Window" by Audre Lorde.
> 
> Also I'm pretending the 2020 Quỳnh arrives in is an alternate universe where we're not in the middle of a fucking pandemic. Escapism.

She doesn’t know how many times she's died. She tried to keep count, at first, to keep herself sane. Back when she expected rescue. Back when she remembered who she was.

She lost count quickly. There was never enough time between panic and drowning and death to think too hard, to remember herself, to remember the deaths before, to know. 

Here is what she knows: saltwater is heavier on the tongue and the stomach than freshwater. It burns going down. 

Here is what she knows: iron breaks her fingernails. 

Here is what she knows: rust cakes onto your skin and becomes part of your body. 

Here is what she knows: darkness. Absolute. Like the sun has been shot out of the sky. 

Here is what she knows: her own name. Barely. 

The coffin rusts and flakes away. She doesn’t know how long it takes. It doesn’t change anything. The manacles last longer, and they weigh her down, and she is still at the bottom of the ocean when they too are gone, buried in silt and rock. She is still as trapped as ever. She drowns. She suffocates. She breathes in grains of sand and saltwater. She doesn't know.

* * *

Five hundred years. Five hundred years and not a breath of air. Five hundred years under the waves, drowning and screaming, drowning and screaming. It’s surprising she survived, really. She’s surprised. She would have thought, that many deaths in quick succession, her body would have given it up. But no. Unfortunately for her. She should be so lucky.

She’s pulled from the depths of the North Sea by a trawling net, dragged up and deposited on the deck of the trawler alongside a ton of wriggling flatfish and mackerel and more unsavory flotsam and jetsam—trawling, after all, is terrible for the environment and marine life, though she doesn’t learn this until after she kills everyone on board. She uses it as a reason not to feel too guilty—after all, what else was she supposed to do? She barely recognized the language they were speaking—something Nordic, but she’s gotten rusty, can you blame her—and all she knew is they were looking at her like she was a demon, which. She is, in a way. Certainly she wouldn’t have been able to explain herself. Definitely not in a language she barely remembers. The crew isn’t large, only a dozen of them, and she takes them by surprise. Who would have thought the half-drowned twig of a woman they’d netted could handle hand-to-hand combat? They were just fishermen. Didn’t even have a gun. 

So, then. The calendar in the tiny cabin says July 2020. 2020. Five hundred and four years. It could have been five. It could have been a thousand. She wouldn’t have really known the difference—but this is egregious. She would understand five years. Fifty. A hundred, even. But they had five hundred years to find her? 

She was, she thinks, forgotten.

It takes her some time to remember. She hadn’t fully forgotten them, of course, but they’d faded. She hadn’t had time to remember between deaths. But now she does. Her family. Nicolò’s edge of a smile and gentle hands. Yusuf’s bright grin, his arm heavy across her shoulders. Andromache. 

Andromache’s everything. Her eyes, her lips, the fall of her hair. The curve of her cheekbone in firelight, the swell of her breast, her husky voice.

They should have found her, and they didn’t.

Five hundred years. 2020, and she doesn’t recognize anything on this ship, materials shiny and metallic rather than wooden, instruments that make no sense, voices and static coming from nowhere, signals and dials blinking like they’re possessed. She has to get off this thing, that much is clear. When she looks to the horizon, she thinks she can see a faint smudge above the waves, and gulls wheel above the rapidly putrefying catch on deck. Not so far from land, then. She has no idea what coast it might be, but that hardly matters, anyway. 

She cuts off the snarl of her hair with a knife she took off one of the fishermen and rubs herself down with a wet cloth, cleaning off lingering grime. She stuffs a rucksack with an extra change of clothes and a leather pouch full of coins, a few banknotes, and strange flat cards made from a material both hard and flexible. She accidentally snaps one of them in half as she investigates and she throws it into the sea, hoping it isn’t important. At the last minute she adds a glass bottle of vodka. That, at least, appears to be much the same as bottles of liquor have always been. 

Similarly, futuristic boats still appear to have lifeboats, and they look much sturdier than the ones she remembers. After an attempt with wrestling a pulley system that seems to be ruled by buttons and levers rather than actual pulleys, she cuts the ropes of the lifeboat with the knife and jumps into the sea, relishing the feeling of buoyancy, and gets into the lifeboat to row towards shore. 

She washes up on a coast she doesn’t recognize, surrounded by a language she doesn’t recognize, though the spelling of words with the Roman alphabet and too many vowels seems vaguely familiar—but, so. She's old, but she hadn’t learned every language there was. They change so fast, after all. 

She wanders the coastal village, incurring strange glances from passing people for her gaping stares at the shiny cleanliness of the streets—even down by the docks—and of the people. Is this really Europe? And the noise! The strange horseless carriages—or, well, things on wheels that don’t really resemble the carriages she remembers at all—rolling up and down the streets, the harsh scent of the air, mixing with the salt of the sea, the _noise_. A lot, evidently, has changed in five hundred years. 

She wanders until she catches sight of familiar words—different, still, than what she remembers, but recognizable. Not the clumsy Roman alphabet, at least. The shop is tiny, the products stacking the shelves as unfamiliar as everything else—bright packages, a dozen different languages, some recognizable, some not. Some of the pictures, at least, look familiar. The faint scent lingering in the air reminds her of spices she thinks she knew once.

A shopkeeper emerges from a back room, nods, calls out a greeting in the language she doesn’t know. She licks her lips, opens her mouth, and answers in her native tongue. Her voice is hoarse and rasping. She hasn’t done anything but scream for five hundred years. The shopkeeper’s eyebrows shoot up, he looks at her carefully and she takes a step back towards the door, shoulders hunching under the heavy sweater. But then he smiles and answers her. It sounds different than she remembers, but she understands.

From him she gets a cup of tea and the beginning of some answers. She plays herself off as a hopelessly lost traveller, and learns she’s on an island—Ameland, in a village called Nes, part of a country called _Nederland._ She doesn’t remember that country, but then he mentions Amsterdam and her mind trawls up long-forgotten geographies, her location sliding into place. She is uncomfortably close to England still, and on an island, surrounded by the sea. It makes her stomach crawl. From him, she gets an English-language newspaper she can vaguely parse out and the address of the nearest inn. 

His gaze follows her as she leaves, concerned and confused both. She, on the other hand, feels infinitely more confident. He’d pulled up a map of the village on a strange, flat box that glowed with the kind of light she’s never seen before. It was like a book with moving pictures. He could press buttons that made words appear on it, and it would show him anything—maps and pictures and words and words and words. He’d asked if she had a phone and she shook her head, having no idea what he was talking about. He’d looked at her strangely, then, but clicked some button or another and produced the map on paper, spat out from another box that made a loud whirring noise. The paper was warm when he handed it to her, and she clutched it to her chest like something precious. Like something magic. 

She needs to get her hands on one of the magic boxes. Then, she thinks, more answers will come. 

Luckily, there are two of them at the inn, which looks absolutely nothing like any inn she remembers—all bright colors and lights, comfortable looking chairs and hardly anyone crowding the common space. The woman there is friendly, though, and takes the papers from her leather pouch and speaks to her in heavily-accented and very strange English after she tries out Vietnamese, Greek, and Ligurian first, with no luck. She tells her she’s free to use the computers, no charge, and gestures towards the boxes. Computers. It takes her a moment to figure out the buttons she has to press to make the pictures change, but one she’s figured it out she’s glued there for hours, trying to piece together this new world she’s been pulled into.

As it turns out it’s not so different than it was before. Everything is a mess and everyone is in everyone else’s business and there are still a handful of very powerful people running most of it. There are wars upon wars upon wars with much nastier weapons than she remembers. Oh, and technology, that’s what all this is called. The computers and the phones and the horseless carriages and the the light summoned at the click of a button or flip of a switch.

All in all, she can handle it. She’s handled worse. Not alone, like now, not alone for a long time, but she pushes that thought down because she cannot think of them—she cannot she cannot she _cannot_ —and goes to bed.

It should be the best night she’s ever had, a real bed, real _sleep_ after so long dying, after so long trapped. She hasn’t slept in five hundred years. 

She can’t.

She tries. She lies down, luxuriates in the impossible softness of the blankets and pillows. Even before she went into the ocean, it had been a long time since she’d slept in a bed. 

The bed is too soft. The bed is too large. She cannot stand being wrapped up in warm covers without the warm body that belongs next to her. She is thirsty, wickedly so, and yet the thought of bringing water to her lips, tipping it into her mouth, and swallowing sends her nearly to a panic. She gets up and stands in front of the mirror in the shared bathroom, bathed in too-bright light, and stares at herself.

Black hair. Dark eyes, even darker bruises under them. Her nose is a little wide, her lips full. Her collarbones stick out like twigs. She looks small. She looks breakable. She looks like nobody she would ever recognize.

She is not breakable. 

She lashes out at the mirror, punching it with all the strength she has. It shatters, shards tinkling down into the white bowl of the sink, onto the cold tiles of the floor. Her fist blooms with pain and she examines it, stretching out her fingers, pulling a shard of glass from the side of her hand and watching the wound close. Blood drips, bright spots on the too-white fixtures. 

She can’t bring herself to turn on the faucet. When she’d come in here earlier she hadn’t expected water to come out when she turned the lever and had fled the room when it did, leaving it running. Now, she avoids it, cleans her fist with a wad of the strange papery fabric next to the latrine, and retreats back down to the empty common room. She turns the computer back on and stays there until morning.

As the sun rises she hears someone curse upstairs about drunks making a mess in the bathroom and slips out to wander the village again. Her eyes burn from exhaustion, but it’s easy to ignore. 

There isn’t much to see in the village. She saw most of it yesterday, but she wanders the same streets again, past pretty brick houses, a few churches she crosses the lane to avoid walking directly in front of, a pristine little park. It’s so early there’s hardly anyone out, but she follows a surprising and familiar scent through the streets and finds a shop just opening—coffee. She didn’t think they ever had it in Europe, only remembers it from the years they spent in Cairo, right before going to England. It’s clearly spread through the centuries, and she always did love the rich, bitter taste of it. She buys a cup of before she can think better of it and takes it to a low stone bench in the park. She spends a long time smelling it, thinking of the taste of it in her mouth—rich, hot, nothing like water, nothing like the cold of the sea. 

She leaves the cup, full and stone cold, sitting on the bench when she leaves.

Again, she doesn’t sleep. Instead she lays in that soft, too-large bed and, unbidden, thinks of Andromache. Of the way their bodies fit together. The scent of her. Her hands, so capable of wrecking death and havoc, and then tender touches, caresses that would take her apart.

She thinks the coffin wouldn’t have been that bad, if only someone had been there with her. Holding her as she died.

The woman who runs the inn finds her at the computers again in the early hours of the morning, before the sun rises. She’s reading about a war that tore apart her homeland for no reason at all, at the will of invaders and outsiders, and she’s crying. She is thinking _Andromache and Nico and Yusuf were probably there_. She is thinking _I hope they were there for the right reasons_. She is thinking _they probably died there, many times._ She is thinking _they might be dead right now, dead forever, and I wouldn’t know. They might be gone and I have no way to find them and I do not know if I want to find them._ She is thinking _I want to kill them for what they did to me and I want to hold them all and never let go and what if they are all gone_? She is thinking all these things and she is crying, lips pressed together tight so no hint of that salt water she’s surprised her body can even produce will make its way into her mouth, and the woman looks worried.

She reaches out a hand, like she means to rest it on her shoulder, and then seems to think better of it and pulls back.

“Do you need help?” she asks softly. “I don’t…you don’t need to tell me anything, but if you need a place to go, we have a little cottage behind our house…it’s out of town a little, it would be hard for…” she trails off, hand still hovering, looking at her slumped over the computer in her too-large sweater and her dark circles, probably stinking to high-heaven because she hasn’t been able to bring herself to wash at all since she stepped onto land. “It would be hard for anyone to find you,” the woman finally finishes.

Does she need help? She has needed help for five hundred years. It is too late for help. This stranger in a strange town in a strange new world is not the help she wants.

But she nods. 

“Yes,” she says, and there is a weight that lifts when she admits it. “I need help.”

* * *

The cottage has three rooms and all of them have a gorgeous view of the ocean.

The first thing she does is move the mattress from the bed into the closet. She pulls all the curtains tight.

She can still hear it, the surf pounding on the pebbly beach just a hundred yards away from the back door.

She sits on the mattress in the closet, wrapped in blankets, hands over her ears, staring at the light peeking through the cracks in the curtains as it moves slowly, steadily across the wooden floor.

She has to get off this island.

Instead of sleeping, she daydreams. She daydreams of deserts, and can almost remember herself there. The light, dry heat. The feeling of sand between her toes. Cracked lips and sunlight that burns right down to your core. 

She would be happy to live out the rest of her eternity in a desert, happy to never see a drop of water ever again.

After another day and night of this terrible fugue state, she rummages through the knapsack from the ship and pulls out the bottle of vodka. Uncaps it, sniffs it. Honestly, it smells better than she remembers.

She remembers being drunk. The pleasant numbness, the lifting of worries and inhibitions. The deep, dark sleep that came after, free of dreams and memories.

She lifts the bottle to her mouth. Lets the liquid brush her lips. Recoils, then steals herself. It floods her mouth and she almost panics, almost breathes it in, almost vomits.

But she doesn’t. Instead, she holds it there, in limbo. She holds it there, and she can still breathe through her nose, and she is in control. She can swallow it, or she can spit it back out. It will not slide down into her lungs, it will not choke her, it will not suffocate her.

She swallows. It burns going down, but nothing like the salt water did. It is sweet compared to the salt water.

She smiles and takes another drink. And another. The crash of waves fades away little by little the more she drinks.

She makes it halfway through the bottle, and then she’s asleep.

* * *

She’s sitting across a wooden table from a young woman. She has long braids and dark skin and big golden hoops in her ears. She has a set of playing cards in her hand and she’s squinting at them, biting her lip slightly. Her fingers tap at the backs of the cards.

They’re in a kitchen, warmly lit against the darkness outside. Something smells delicious. The woman sighs and chooses a card, throwing it down on top of a pile in the center of the table.

“An interesting choice, Nile,” someone says in a familiar voice. She twists to look behind her and just barely catches a glimpse of a brown hand and silver rings when—

She’s walking next to a man down a dark alley. He’s stumbling, bottle clutched in his hand, cursing when his shoulder smashes into a wall. She’s in his head, she feels how drunk he is, feels his anger, his grief, and mostly his overwhelming, suffocating guilt.This stumbling, crumpled up man is a traitor _traitor TRAITOR—_

She wakes, gasping, and promptly throws up on the floor of the closet. It’s nothing but bile and vodka, and it burns a lot worse coming back up than it did going down. When she’s done she curls in a ball and hides her head in her arms, still gasping. 

She dreamed for a long time of her Andromache, fighting her way through the world until she came to her side, and of Lykon after. She dreamed of those two idiots killing each other a hundred times over and pretending they weren’t falling in love for two excruciating decades before they finally tracked them down. These dreams are of a familiar sort, and the sound of what she’s sure was Yusuf’s voice, the glimpse of his hand, confirms it.

She hadn’t even considered the possibility of new immortals, stupidly. It’s been five hundred years. The odds were good for at least one, but two….

Two new ones, and Yusuf alive and with one of them. The woman seemed content, peaceful in that warm kitchen with her card game and Yusuf, but the man….

She grimaces, spitting to get the taste of half-digested vodka out of her mouth. The man seems like an unpleasant sort of person to be dreaming of. She’s plenty familiar with hangovers and self loathing. She doesn’t need to dream about it every night. He’s very clearly alone, untrustworthy, and won’t help her find the others, but it might be worth tracking him down just so the dreams don't continue....

Because she _can_ track them down. She can find them. The realization sets off a storm of conflicting emotions. If she falls back asleep, will she see the others, too, through this new woman’s eyes? She wonders if the others are there. She can’t imagine Yusuf anywhere without Nico, unless the unthinkable had happened and Nico had died, or become…lost, like her. And Andromache…

Andromache was old. Centuries older than herself. Lykon died much younger than Andromache was now. 

She clenches her fist in the front of her sweater and winds the fabric around her fingers, clutching tight. She aches for them, and she never wants to see them again. Yusuf and the new woman, sitting in that warm kitchen with the smell of dinner cooking and a card game between them—how dare they have that. How dare Yusuf sit anywhere, play a card game, cook a meal. She’d trusted him to find her, and five hundred years passed, and he was sitting somewhere warm and safe and well-fed and not lonely, like he’d forgotten all about her. Like he never cared about her at all.

She twists her sweater around her fingers until they lose their feeling and cries herself back to sleep.

* * *

This time, she wakes up angry.

She will find them. She is pitiful right now, and weak. She has never before been weak, not in her entire life, and she’d rather be dead than pitiful. 

Actually, at this point, she’d rather be dead than a lot of things, but she isn’t. She’s here. She's alive, and she's been alive for thousands of years, and she will not let that iron coffin and the abandonment of her family overpower her. She is out of the water now. She refuses to drown.

She leaves the closet for the first time in days and stumbles to the sink in the kitchen. She fills a glass with water from the tap. Beyond the curtains, the sea churns. It’s stormy today, the clouds low and gunmetal grey, the horizon blurring into the waves. The water cools her skin, even through the glass.

She raises it to her lips. It’s as easy as the vodka. She lets it spill into her mouth. 

She holds it there, like she did with the vodka. For one minute. Two. Barely breathing. It warms in her mouth, until it matches her body temperature. It tastes like the purest thing in the world, like it will cleanse her down to her bones. It tastes nothing like salt water, but it sits with the same heaviness in her mouth, weighing her down.

She turns away from the windows and stares resolutely at the floor. 

She is in control.

She can swallow, or she can spit.

She will not drown.

She swallows, and the feel of it slipping down her raw, dry throat sends her to her knees. She crouches there on the floor, gasping, and then she takes another drink. And another. And another, until the glass is empty and she stares at it. She lifts her fingers to her lips. They were dry and cracked, and already they are healing. She wonders how close she was to dying of dehydration. It takes a long time, but she’s not even sure how long she’s been in this cottage.

She stands. Fills the glass again. Drinks it down again. And again, and again, and again. When her stomach is heavy with water weight, she sits down at the tiny kitchen table and starts to plan.

* * *

Paris is so different, and yet comfortingly similar. The old brickwork, the dark alleyways. She’d always hated this part of Europe, even before England—too cold, too wet, too grey. Why come to this corner of the world at all when there was so much more out there? She’d hated Paris as much as the rest of it, but they’d spent a decent amount of time here, on and off, and the crowded core of the city is the same skeleton of the city she remembers. She can find her way around. 

Booker—that’s the new one’s name, she’s caught the new woman, Nile, mentioning it a few times in her dreams—lives in a tiny apartment near the university. She haunts him, his comings and goings. She’d let herself dream so much during those final days in Nes she feels like she knows him better than anyone. The pathetic drunkard. The traitor. Wallowing in guilt and self pity. 

She hates him. She loathes that she has to come to him first—though an end to the dreams is welcome. The others are moving around constantly; she can’t seem to track them. She catches glimpses, but they’re always in a different place, always moving. This she knows: Yusuf and, blessedly, Andromache, are alive, traveling with the new woman. She hasn’t seen their faces, but she hears their voices. Catches glimpses of Yusuf’s shoulders, his hands, and once the precious curve of Andromache’s ear. Of Nico, there is no trace. 

Booker, on the other hand, is sedentary. He hardly moves from a mile radius of his apartment. He is drunk most of the time. He is pathetic, but he has information. He has contact with people, probably would be able to contact the others in an emergency—she knows her family. They are far too kind, far too lenient. Booker has not been left entirely alone, though he deserves to be. 

She watches him leave one morning, the crisp of the encroaching autumn harsh against her skin. She sits on a bench across the street and sees him stumble out the door, looking worse for the wear, dark circles under his eyes. He drank himself to death on purpose last week, and woke cursing and crying. She was there next to him, looking on in her dreams. How she hates him.

He walks down the block and disappears around the corner. She stands, smoothing her coat, and crosses the street. The apartment building is old, the stairs creaking. He lives on the second floor. There’s an empty bottle of whisky on the landing. She lets herself in his door. The fool hadn’t even remembered to lock it. 

The apartment is a disaster, just as she’d seen in the dreams, just as she’d expected. It smells rank, like dirty dishes and vomit and old alcohol. Breakfast sits half-finished on the table. There are three laptop computers and piles of books everywhere. She peruses them absentmindedly—it’s an impressive collection, she’s grudgingly impressed—and stares out the window at the view of an alley and the brick of a neighboring building.

She’s just pouring herself a glass of water when she hears him stumble to the door. He has his wits about him more than she would expect—he comes in with a finger on the trigger, eyes wide—but she knows he won’t shoot. She takes a sip of water, holds it in her mouth for a moment. She is in control—of the water, of herself, of him, of the future.

“ _Booker,”_ she says as he stares, testing out the name in her mouth, relishing in his full-body flinch. “It’s nice to finally meet you.”


	2. i am tried beyond strength or bearing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Graphic depictions of violence warning is for this chapter. Quỳnh is not very nice to anyone, and her revenge includes shooting, stabbing, holding someone captive, and hanging.

Booker stumbles back until he hits the wall, eyes huge, but he doesn’t drop the gun. His finger twitches on the trigger. She’s grudgingly impressed.

“Who—“ he shakes his head, blinks, and cuts himself off because, of course, he knows exactly who she is.

“Oh, Booker,” she says, smiling at him widely. She knows her smile isn’t comforting. She’s been practicing in front of mirrors, and she looks frightening even to herself. “You know exactly who I am.”

He blinks again. “The dreams,” he mumbles, as if to himself. “That was you, by the sea…”

She laughs and even to her own ears she sounds unhinged. “That was me, in the sea, by the sea. You didn’t see me coming? I’ve been dreaming you.”

“I…I thought I was dreaming of other things…my own memories…I never saw you.”

“Lucky you,” she says cooly, and he laughs—a short bark, though absolutely nothing is funny. 

“I stopped dreaming of you in the water,” he says, and with every word his grip on the gun loosens. “I thought you’d finally died.”

“Yes,” she says. “That would have been easier for everyone, wouldn’t it?” And then she’s moving, and she thinks he probably didn't expect her to be quite so fast, quite so graceful. But she had millennia to become a fighter, and he’s only had two hundred odd years, and five hundred didn’t take away her muscle memory.

She disarms him and has him on his knees before he can get another word out. Maybe he’s more drunk than she thought, maybe it was only adrenaline that helped his reaction time. No matter. She clocks him on the head with the butt of his gun and he slumps over. The bump heals quickly, but it’s still plenty of time to have him tied tightly to one of his kitchen chairs before he’s blinking awake. He’s testing his bonds before he even opens his eyes, and slumps back against the chair when he sees her leaning up against the counter, staring at him.

“What do you want?” he asks wearily, like he already knows.

“What did you do to them?” she asks instead of answering, and he jolts in surprise.

“What?”

“You reek of guilt. You’re a traitor, you do nothing but drink, you hate yourself and your life, and you did something to them. Something horrible. You hurt them.”

“You don’t already know? I thought you saw in your dreams.”

“I know you did something. You betrayed them.” Her hand slides around the hilt of a kitchen knife resting by the sink and she’s in front of him in moments, resting it against his neck, digging the point of it where his pulse beats fast. “Tell me.”

He laughs. “You think that scares me? Something tells me I can’t trust you.”

“Oh,” she says mockingly, digging it deeper until a drop of blood swells up and threads its way slowly down his neck. “How rich, coming from you. _Talk._ ”

He grits his teeth. “I sold them out. Myself, too. I thought they’d help us find a way to die, and I thought if someone could do research on us, it might help…well, help someone someday. They didn’t tell me what they really wanted from us. They wanted to keep us like lab rats, not help us die.”

She presses harder and he winces, the blade biting into his neck and stopping the cut from healing. “You fool. What happened? What did they do?”

“Captured Joe and Nicky,” he croaks out. “Tortured them. Then me and Andy—“

“Andy?”

He blinks up at her. “Andy. Andromache.” 

Her hand tightens on the knife. Booker is gasping under her, the knife slowly slipping deeper. “They captured her? Experimented on her?”

“Well—“

But she’s had enough. She slits his throat, drops the knife on the floor, and steps back to let him bleed out. 

When he comes awake, gasping, spitting blood, fingers scrabbling against the arms of the chair, she’s standing against the counter again, sipping her glass of water. 

“So,” she says. “They banished you. That’s kind of them. I would have done worse.”

“I’m sure you would have,” he rasps.

She brings her glass over to the table and sets it down carefully, pulling out a chair and sitting delicately so they’re facing each other, the mess of breakfast dishes and old beer bottles between them.

“You’re going to tell me where they are now. You’re going to help me find them, you’re going to give me any information and support I ask for, you’re going to give me the contact information for this man they’re working with now, you’re going to make me papers and an identity. Then I will leave you alone to rot for however long they decided you should.”

He laughs again, empty and humorless. “No.”

She raises an eyebrow, takes a sip of water, holds it in her mouth. “No?”

He shakes his head. “You’ll hurt them.”

She clenches her fists, rage rising. How dare this small, sad man tell her anything about herself, her plans, her motivations? How dare he, of all people, try to protect the people he betrayed from their own family? She’s more theirs’ than _he_ is. And, she reminds herself, she has a right to be angry. She has a plan and her revenge is justified.

She calms the anger like a rising tide. “Now you care for their safety?”

He shakes his head slowly, eyes far away. “I will never hurt them again. I will do everything in my power to protect them all from pain, until our times finally come.”

“Pretty words,” she snaps at him. “But I can make you tell me. You might not be able to die, you might heal, but I can still cause great pain.”

He meets her eyes, steely and determined. “I’m sure you can.”

So. He is confident. She will beat him, she knows. She will have him curled and whimpering in the palm of her hand. 

She smiles.

* * *

She starts with what she doesn’t need him to tell her—his computers are a treasure trove of information, and she devours all she can. She doesn’t need him to make her papers or an identity, because he has the software on his computers for her to do it herself. She takes his phone into his bathroom and amuses herself for nearly an hour taking the perfect passport photo, her red coat standing out nicely against the white tiles. She can’t smile in the photo, but she looks frightening enough just staring into the camera. Then, she moves on to mission files and debriefs, folders upon folders of information, some encrypted, which he won’t unlock for her, but many not. She sits across him and scrolls and scrolls and reads and reads as the day fades and he dozes, head falling back before he jerks awake and mumbles at her from behind the makeshift gag she shoved in his mouth—a stained dishrag that was next to the sink. She’s sure it’s all very unpleasant for him, and it delights her.

As it turns out, she doesn’t need his help much after all. She catches him off-guard every so often, asks him a question that doesn’t that doesn’t directly pertain to the others, or to their new fixer, or to most of the time he spent with them— _“Is this a phone number?”, “Where do you get your weapons now?”, “What are airplanes?”_ He answers her, sometimes absentmindedly, sometimes looking guilty that he let anything slip out of his mouth at all. 

They have safe houses scattered all over the globe, in nearly every country. They have weapon caches and storage units filled with the flotsam and jetsam accumulated over centuries and millennia. There are many rules you have to follow now when you travel—for example, on the airplanes you cannot carry weapons, or, for some reason, water, which seems terribly impractical to her. Flying through the air in close quarters with hundreds of others and no way to defend yourself? Foolish. Riding horses and traveling by boat may have taken longer, but it must have been safer.

No matter. There’s no way to get around the fact she’ll probably have to take a plane, or the train again. She will travel to wherever they are, either break into another safe house in whatever country they’re in or acquire a weapon from one of Booker’s contacts, scattered across the globe. She will knock on their door. She will—well, she wants to kill them, and she thinks she will. Just once. And then, when she is not angry anymore, she will talk to them and understand why they left her. What happened. And then, maybe, she will finally have them back.

She just needs to know where they are. The one thing the computers and files and phone numbers can’t tell her.

She knows Booker knows. Knows he has an idea, at least. When she’d asked if they were still in contact with him, he hadn’t answered, but his eyes darted around, wouldn’t meet her own. 

She won’t give him food or water. She won’t let him up from the chair. He soils himself, and it smells, but she ignores it. He doesn't beg, just glares at her from across the table, silent and angry.

“Where are they?” she asks him again, late one night, a few days after she arrived. His wrist is bleeding from where he’s pulled against the ropes and he looks skeletal. 

“Nile said you were crazy,” he says slowly, eyes locked on hers. “She said, _she feels crazy_. I think she was right.”

Her hand closes around the kitchen knife she keeps close at hands and throws it at him. It sticks in his neck. He drowns in his own blood as he dies.

* * *

“How did they find you?” she asks casually, three days later as she eats toast and Booker’s eyes follow its path from the plate to her mouth. “When you first died?”

He may not give her any details about their current whereabouts, or about the new woman, Nile, but he sometimes allows her to lead the conversation towards the past. He’s tired now, and thirsty, and hungry. She can see it in him, the desperation building. He licks his lips, his voice hoarse.

“I died fighting for Napoleon. They found me in Russia, in the winter, when we were starving.”

“On the battlefield?”

He winces. “No. There was no food, no shelter, the Russians burned their own forests so we wouldn’t have wood for fires. I ran, they caught me. I was hanged for desertion. Andy came across me three days later.”

She remembers that, remember hanging, choking, dying, coming back to life still at the end of a rope. It’s a horrible way to die. Not as horrible as drowning for five hundred years, but horrible.

She schools her features away from sympathy. “So you’ve always been a coward, then,” she says, and he looks away.

She scoffs, stands, and grabs a water glass. She tips it into his mouth, ignoring him as he chokes and it runs down his neck. He gulps it eagerly, still, and licks his lips when she pulls it away. 

“Thank you,” he says sincerely. She ignores him and shuts herself in the bathroom, staring at her reflection and letting her mind run for hours and hours. She’s tired of him, tired of sitting here not _acting_ , tired of the same old dream fragments that tell her nothing. She has documentation and a passport, money and weapons at her fingertips. She has a list of contacts in dozens of cities who only need to hear Booker’s name to do what she wants them to. What is she waiting for?

The last missing piece is where they went after they banished him, is where they are now, and she knows he knows. 

Your first death weighs on you. You never forget it, no matter how old you get. Andromache hates the cold, and stab wounds. Nico always took the longest to come back from wounds to the stomach, where Yusuf first shoved his scimitar, and Yusuf from injuries direct to his heart, where Nico’s longsword pierced him. She herself would do anything to avoid having her throat slit.

She is willing to bet Booker is not fond of strangulation.

* * *

He fights her, but he’s weak from lack of food and sleep. She drags him to the bedroom. The moment he sees the noose hanging from the ceiling beam he throws himself backwards, struggling even harder. “No,” he gasps, “No, please.”

She slams him into the wall so hard he clearly blacks out for a moment, and shakes him when his gaze finds her’s again. “Tell me. Tell me where they are, and I won’t.”

“No!” he growls, and twists away from her, gets a knee in her gut, scrambles away towards the door when she falls back. She lunges after him, grabs her kitchen knife from the table, stabs him in the back. He chokes, groans, sags. She kicks him in the head and seizes him by the shoulders, dragging him back to the bedroom as he kicks his legs wildly. Stabs him again in the eye and binds his knees and ankles while he’s down, writhing in pain. Gets the noose around his neck and tightens it, hauls him to his feet, up to his very tip toes.

“Don’t, don’t,” he groans, blinking against his regrowing eye.

“All you have to do is tell me,” she says, but he says nothing, and she hauls him up until he’s choking. He’s heavy, but she grits her teeth and watches him choke and flail and die. She leaves him to gasp back to life and goes back out to the main room, returning with a kitchen chair. He’s gasping again when she returns, and when his feet find the wood of the chair he sags with relief, sobbing. 

“Where are they?”

“Please,  Quỳnh , don’t do this.”

She pulls the chair away. He dies two more times, pleads with her again, dies again. She wishes he would just give in. This leaves her feeling queasy.

Finally, when she replaces the chair, he nods. She waits, gives him a moment to catch his breath, to relax.

“Where?” she demands.

“Lagos,” he finally says, gasping, eyes wide and unseeing and trailing tears. “Last I knew, they were in Lagos. There’s a safe house in Surulere, on Adebola Ojomu Street, next to a church. That’s all, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

“Thank you,” she says, shoves the dishrag into his mouth, and kicks the chair away.

She leaves him choking.

* * *

They are not in Lagos. She learns this after she arrives there and finds an apartment that is clearly empty. It’s impossible to know if they were there and left, or if Booker simply lied. She should have known better than to trust anything that came out of that traitor’s mouth. She knows well enough torture doesn't work. She sleeps that night on a cheap hotel bed and she dreams—thankfully—of Nile, standing on a busy street with steel and glass buildings rising around her. She moves through a crowd of people, and there are signs in some windows—PHILLY STRONG.

When she wakes, she searches the phrase on the phone she stole from Booker and comes up with Philadelphia.

Interesting. She has read much about America, but she was thrown in the water before it even existed, and they never set foot on that continent, had only heard of it. Of course, on the plane, she dreams again and they aren’t there. Now, it is a place she recognizes. Nile gives her flashes of winding streets, of weathered golden brick buildings, of a wide, blue sea visible in the distance. She knows this place. She has been there, several times over the centuries. It was, she remembers, a place very dear to Yusuf and Nico. Mdina.

She lands in Philadelphia, buys herself a terrible sandwich, decides she doesn’t much care for America or the broad flatness of their accents, and boards another plane in less than two hours. She lands in Valletta and is so tired she can barely stumble to the nearest hotel. Lucky that Malta and Lagos share a time zone, but she’s spent more than a day in the air and her internal clock is scrambled. She can’t be clumsy for this. She sleeps and dreams, finally, of Nico. Just a glimpse of him, the edge of a profile she can’t quite focus on, his hands. He’s cooking, of course he is, and she wakes up with tears wet on her cheeks.

Yusuf and Nico had a house near Mdina long before she went into the sea, and she thinks they must be there, or nearby if that house has crumbled to dust. She knows from Booker’s files they have an apartment in Valletta, too, knows the address thanks to a letter with a return address that Booker had kept foolishly tucked in his bookcase. She goes there and picks the lock easily. She would have thought they would be more careful, more secure. 

The apartment is small, well lived in. Light streams in through big windows, there’s a small balcony that looks out over the harbor. It’s dusty, but not the dust of a place long-uninhabited. The kitchen has modern appliances, a laptop rests on the desk. There’s an abandoned mug in the sink with a dark crust of coffee in the bottom. Books everywhere, paintings on the walls. And, of course, weapons. Swords leaning in corners, a crossbow on the dresser in the bedroom. And guns. 

She peruses them, musing. She’s not used to shooting a gun, they were only just coming into use in the years before she went into the sea. Most of these are well maintained and modern, though there are a clear few that are very old. She passes them over and tests the weight of the others in her hands. She doesn’t want something too big, she wants something that will fit in one hand, just squeeze the trigger. 

She eventually chooses a small black one that fits comfortably, lightly, against the palm of her hand and sorts through a pile of bullets, cartridges, and magazines until she finds what fits. She still has the kitchen knife from Booker's apartment, they'd grown attached during her time there, and she grabs another small knife from a drawer in the kitchen.Then she stuffs everything in her bag and leaves, locking the door behind her. She will tell them when she sees them that they should get a better locking mechanism, that it was far too easy to break in. Then she takes the bus to Mdina.

It’s still the same house, sat on a rise a bit out of town with a view of the distant sea. The road is paved now and busy with cars, and there are more houses and farm fields than there were, and a bus stop across the street. The house has clearly been through many repairs, but it’s the same. Small and built of the golden stone that makes up most of the city, sheltered behind a crumbling stone wall and some tall cypress and gnarled olive trees. She remembers one night here with sudden terrifying clarity, eating fresh sheep’s cheese and olives from the trees outside and flatbread Yusuf had baked. They’d played dice and she had won, over and over again until Andromache bowled her over and started kissing her, distracting them from the game. Yusuf and Nico had left them alone and she and Andromache remained, twined together in front of the fire, warm skin against warm skin, hands and tongues caressing. 

A car honks loudly and she realizes she has stepped away from the house and into the road. She steps forward again and car passes, the driver making a rude gesture towards her. She dips her hand into her bag and draws out the gun, then walks into the yard.

There’s no car parked in front, but it doesn’t matter. If they aren’t home, she’ll wait for them. She knocks at the door, grips the gun tight. There’s a moment of silence, then footsteps. Muffled through the door she hears the tail end of a sentence: “—Andy and Nile back. Nile will have forgotten her key again.”

The door opens, the person behind it still facing mostly away, finishing his sentence. As he turns towards her, he starts another: “I hope you found the type of wine I was—“

Yusuf trails off, jaw dropping, hand falling from the door to dangle limply at his side. He looks different—curls longer, beard shorter—but also unbearably similar. The crows feet at the corner of his warm dark eyes. The way he holds himself. Her mind spirals. She remembers how his arms feel, wrapped around her, warm and strong. His laughter. His shoulder pressed against hers around a fire. The good-natured teasing they would share, poking fun at each other, at their more severe companions, at themselves. Yusuf. She’s missed him so much, and half of her wants to wilt forward into his arms, drop the gun and let him hug the grief away like he used to. 

And she remembers thinking of him, under the waves, as she drowned. Thinking he would never stop looking for her, not until she was found.

_Five hundred years._

She lifts the gun and shoots him in the head. He drops like a rock, like a dead body, because that’s what he is—she kills him. His eyes stare unseeing towards the sky and blood spreads around his head in a perverse halo. 

There’s a slam from somewhere inside the house, like a chair falling to the floor. More footsteps, a shouted “ _Joe!_ ”—and of course, where Yusuf is, Nico is not far behind. He rushes into the hallway, gun at the ready, pointed towards the door. He sees Yusuf, dead, his face tightens in anger, he raises the gun—and stumbles to a stop. “ _Quỳnh_?” he gasps.

“Hello, Nico,” she says, and smiles at him, wiping a spot of Yusuf’s blood from her temple. “It is good to see you.”

He looks at Yusuf, then back at her, completely lost. “A dream,” he murmurs, gun dropping to his side. “I’m dreaming—“

“I am afraid not,” she says, and shoots him twice in the chest. He goes down with a cry, shuddering on the floor. She keeps her gun trained on him as she steps forward into the house, wondering where Andromache is. She needs her, needs to see her, needs to kiss her, needs to kill her and then kiss her again. Nico’s wounds are mortal, but she did not shoot him in the heart. He will die slowly, drowning in his own blood. It is only right. She hears him wheezing behind her and ignores it, walking back over to Yusuf, still lying limp in a pool of blood. She toes at him and his head lolls. 

“Wake up,” she says, like that will speed things up. It is taking longer than she remembers, but then again, her memory might be shaky. She crouches down by his head and watches him intently as Nico chokes his name and hers behind her. She doesn’t look back at him. It is all temporary. 

Yusuf’s eyes fly open and he chokes, gasping, curling on his side, hand reaching for a weapon that isn’t there. His eyes dart back and forth, looking for Nicolò, of course, always his first concern. She knows he hears his weakening gasps, the light of panic in his eyes makes that much clear. He’s on his hands and knees, starting to crawl towards him, before he sees her. He freezes, scanning her face.

“Quỳnh?” he whispers after a moment. “Is this real?” Then, after a moment, his brow furrows. “Did you shoot me?”

“Where is Andromache?” she asks, rather than answering.

“Did you shoot _Nicky_?” he asks, eyes flicking back to him, horrified. “What—why—?”

She levels the gun at him again. “Andromache,” she says.

“I—she’s out, with Nile, they’ll be back soon, but Quỳnh—“

She does not want to answer his questions. That information was all she needed. She shoots him again and Nico screams behind her, though the scream is barely an exhalation of air, really, because he is very close to dead now. She turns to him. He blinks up at her, wheezes, reaches out a bloodstained hand towards her ankle. She moves it out of the way. She does not want blood on her boots. She wants to see Andromache again looking perfect, not disheveled, not bloody. She wants to prove them all wrong. She is not _crazy_ , she is only angry. Very angry.

Nico’s eyes always were wondrous. Like the sky at dawn, like sea glass. They glaze over as she watches, and he goes still. She waits.

Yusuf wakes again before he does, gasping, Nico’s name on his lips. He sees her standing over him and snarls. “You gonna shoot me again?”

She takes a step back, leveling the gun at him. “I will wait here for Andromache.”

His eyes dart between her, Nico, and Nico’s pistol, sticking out from under his body. He could have reached it to shoot her sometime during his long death, but he hadn’t. Had he still thought it was all an impossibility, a dream?

Yusuf glares at her as he levers himself up off the floor and moves towards Nico. She lets him, but tracks him with the gun. He crouches over him, tenderly thumbing away the trail of blood from his mouth. “Nico,” he murmurs, “wake up.”

She remembers this. Crouching over one of them, hundreds and hundreds of times, waiting for them to wake up. Wanting the first thing they saw to be a friendly face, someone who would take care of them. Yusuf’s hands, she notices, are trembling.

Nico gasps, chokes on the leftover blood still pooled in his mouth, and flails onto his side to spit it out. Joe soothes him in Ligurian, in their old Arabic that was no longer spoken anywhere even when she’d gone over the side of the boat. At least it means she can understand them. Nico stares at her with his strange eyes. “It was not a dream?” he asks in Arabic, dazedly. 

Yusuf eyes her. “I do not think so.”

Nico makes to stand. Yusuf puts a hand on his arm to stop him. Her grip on the gun does not waver. “How—I—how did you get here?”

“I took a plane,” she says. “They’re very convenient.”

“I mean—“

“I know what you mean,” she snaps, already tired of the conversation. Why does she owe them answers? Why does _she_ have to be the one explaining things when _they_ left her behind?  


“Quỳnh—“

“I liked it better when you were drowning,” she decides. “Now you know what it feels like.” It’s a silly statement—she knows Nico has drowned before this, many times—they all have. But it still feels good to shoot him again. He has the audacity to look surprised, hand clutching at his chest as he sags over, and Yusuf screams and grabs the pistol, but she shoots it out of his hand before he can pull the trigger. He scrambles towards her, across the floor, and she’s about to pull the trigger again when—

“What the _fuck_.”

She and Yusuf both freeze, then turn towards the still-open door.

And there she is. Her hair is cropped short and she wears dark, plain clothing. Silver in her ears. Sunglasses. Plain, sensible, everything easy to move in if she needs to fight, or run. The lines of her lips, the swell of her breasts, the span of her legs—all achingly familiar. _Andromache_. She stands partially behind another woman, the one who spoke—Nile. She’s taking in the scene in front of her with wild eyes, hand already moving to where a gun is obviously concealed in her waistband.

Andromache just stares at her, frozen. Her fingers go slack around the plastic bag she’s holding and it drops to the ground, the crack of breaking glass loud in the silence. Red wine spreads from it, a perfect twin to the halo of Yusuf’s drying blood further into the hallway. 

She loves her. She _missed_ her. She’s never hated anything more.

She raises the gun.

Behind her, Yusuf yells “Quỳnh, _no,_ you can’t!” and lunges for her, knocking her off-balance. The shot flies wide as she stumbles and falls, buries itself in the wall, and Nile shrieks. She grits her teeth, elbows Yusuf in the nose, and aims again. Through the whole debacle, Andromache hasn’t moved. Quỳnh thinks maybe she hasn’t even blinked, though the sunglasses hide her eyes—her beautiful eyes. She doesn’t even twitch a hand towards the weapon Quỳnh knows she must be carrying.

She squeezes the trigger and, fast as lightning, Nile lunges in front of Andromache, and takes the bullet in her neck. Yusuf yells her name as she goes down choking _,_ and Quỳnh is puzzled. While the protective instinct is certainly strong, especially within their little family unit, it doesn't make sense that this woman would die for Andromache, not when Andromache will have no more lasting damage from a gunshot wound than a normal human would from a mosquito bite. She’s frustrated, frustrated they’re all fighting her so hard when she _deserves this_ , she was left behind, she deserves revenge, they deserve to be hurt by her hand, just once, before she can start to forgive. She starts to raise the gun again and then dimly realizes Yusuf is talking to her, begging, hands on her arms as he tries to pull her away.

“Please,” he is saying. “You can’t, you can’t, she’ll die, you can’t.”

She turns and glares at him and realizes he is bleeding from scratches on his hands, his face, where she clawed at him with one hand as he tried to pull her away. “What do you mean?” she snarls. “She’ll come back. She _left me_.”

Yusuf’s eyes are huge and he’s panting like he’s run a very long distance. “I know, I understand, but she’ll die, Quỳnh, for good. She’s mortal.”

She laughs, because he is obviously lying. Andromache, mortal? She herself certainly is not mortal, and there is no way Andromache would go before her. 

“Shut up,” she says, pointing the gun at him again, then swiveling it towards Nico, who is gasping his dying breathes again. “I’ll shoot him. Over and over, and I’ll make you watch. Don’t lie to me.”

He looks agonized. “I’m not.”

“He’s not lying.”

If she was not already on the ground, that voice would bring her to her knees. She swivels back around to Andromache and is paralyzed by her gaze. She’s taken off her sunglasses and the grey-blue of her eyes stares right down into her soul. She shakes her head. Andromache just nods in answer, then reaches out to her, a gesture she aborts halfway through, leaving her hand hanging in the empty space between them.

This is wrong. This is not supposed to happen. This is not what she was supposed to come back to. What is she doing here? What can she do now? She's killed the rest of them and the rage in her chest cools to embers in the face of this horror, this impossibility. She lifts the hand not holding the gun, starts reaching towards Andromache, suddenly desperate just to feel the warmth of her skin—

Nile gasps back to life at the same time Nico stops breathing. Behind her, she hears Yusuf scramble away to Nico. In front of her, Nile rolls to her feet—good reflexes, good recovery, she has promise—and immediately puts herself between Andromache and Quỳnh where she’s still crouched on the ground. Andromache’s hand drops.

She picks herself off the ground with as much dignity as she can muster, keeping a hold on the gun. “ _He_ lied to me, then,” she says, musing.

Andromache’s brow furrows, the first real expression to cross her face besides shock. She hasn’t even said her name. Something cold and heavy curls in her stomach, not unlike the cold chill of saltwater. “Who?” Andromache asks. Nile seems to catch on much quicker.

“Where’s Booker?” she asks frantically. “What have you done to him?”

She looks at her, standing in front of Andromache, still shielding her even as blood stains her shoulder. She wonders, vaguely, if Andromache has moved on to younger, less damaged goods, and then curses herself for thinking it. Of course she has, even if it isn’t this girl in front of her. It’s been five hundred years. “I took what I needed from him and left.”

“Where _is_ he?”

“A terrible flat in Paris,” she says finally, turning towards the door. Her breathing comes short, her heart is pounding, she needs to get away. “I left him in enough of a predicament to slow him down, so he would not follow me. I’ve no doubt your fixer has already found him, though. Or he got himself down. I don't care about _him_.”

She leaves.


	3. love, we are both shorelines

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter warnings: Suicidal intent (obviously unsuccessful), vomiting.

She should leave Mdina. Leave the island altogether. Instead, she rents a hotel room in town, locks herself in the bathroom, and runs a bath. 

She stares at the water, trailing her fingers through it. She’s subsisted mainly on sponge baths since she came out of the sea, and even that is difficult. The feeling of water on her skin sends shivers through her body, still manifests the phantom weight of chains around her wrists and saltwater heavy in her stomach. She might get used to showers someday—she’s only had two, but she was able to close her eyes and imagine herself in a rainstorm, face tilted to the sky, letting the water wash everything away. That’s a good invention. 

She’s not sure why she’s doing this to herself. Pure torture, for no real reason. Only, she wants to feel pain right now. She wants to feel agony. For a brief moment, she almost wishes she was back under the waves. Better that than living free in a world where Andromache is dying. 

She stands, determined, sheds her clothes, and steps into the bath. Her entire body screams at her to leave, to escape, goosebumps prickling up her arms and legs, stomach twisting. She ignores it and lowers herself until she’s lying in the water, head propped up against the back of the tub, body strange and wavering under the water. She tilts her head back and breathes.

Andromache. Andromache bleeding, and not healing. Andromache dying. Andromache, the eternal, the woman who was worshipped as a god, gone. Like she was never here at all, only—how could it be possible for someone as eternal as her to die? She has been here for so long. Longer than memory.

Andromache, dead while Quỳnh still lives. Unacceptable. Unbelievable. Nico and Yusuf always said they would die together, because for what other reason did they find each other when they did? Andromache was leagues older than Quỳnh, they did not come to immortality together, but she’s always believed the same for them. That they must have been made for each other, to find each other, to run through the world side by side. To die together, when death finally came.

And the anger rises. She shouldn’t have been stuck under the water for five hundred years. They should have found her, or she should have freed herself. Unacceptable. Unbelievable. What was the _point_?  


She slides her face below the water. It is warm, unlike the relentless cold of the sea. She couldn’t bring herself to step into cold water. The feel of it against her nose, pressing on her lips, is so familiar it’s almost comforting. How perverse, for her to be more comfortable drowning than living. 

She opens her mouth and lets the water flood in.

* * *

And wakes, of course. Gasping and crying and panicked, she hauls herself out of the tub and vomits water and the toast she managed to eat for breakfast into the toilet. 

Silly idea. If five hundred years in the ocean didn’t do it, a shallow bathtub won’t. 

She’d pointed a gun at Andromache. Pointed it and shot it and would have killed her, like she killed Nico and Yusuf, ruthlessly and without remorse. The bullet would have gone between her eyes and that would have been it. Killed by her lover, killed by her other half, killed by the woman who went insane with her loneliness under the waves. Maybe Booker was right.

She vomits again, this time only bringing up bile. Soaking wet, she starts to shiver in the puddle of water she’s dragged from the bathtub. How pathetic. She loathes the idea of being pitiful, but she can’t pretend she’s anything but that right now.

Her anger, as it turns out, was taking up a rather large space in her. Without it, she feels hollowed out and empty. She thought she would go from anger to love, from loneliness into the arms of her family. She had thought they would let her kill them and hurt them and accept her back with open arms; and how stupid she was, knowing her family—knowing how slow they are to forgive those who hurt them. She’ll be lucky if Nico and Yusuf don’t kill her on the spot if she ever sees them again. She can’t pretend she wouldn’t deserve it. 

She wants to be angry still. She wants to rage, to break things, to cry. She _is_ angry, in a distant way, angry at the circumstances, at the sheer bad luck. The anger doesn’t fill her, though, doesn’t give her purpose. She can’t summon the energy for purpose. Perhaps, she thinks, this anger is more like grief. Low and simmering and twisting up her stomach and heart into knots, a sense of wrongness that cannot be alleviated.

She drags herself, still dripping, to the bed and wraps herself up in the sheets. When she finally falls asleep, hours later, her dreams are empty, nothing but deep cold and the crushing weight of an endless sea.

* * *

When she wakes an indeterminable amount of time later, the burner phone she stole from Booker is ringing. She rolls over to look at it—unknown name, unknown number, of course, but only a few people know this number, none of whom she wants to talk to. She shouldn’t have taken it. She should have thrown it away. 

The ringing stops. She reaches over, thumbs through the notifications. Three missed calls. Five messages. An email newsletter from something called the SOMM Journal. 

Message 1: _We think you have this phone. Nile found Booker. He told us what happened. Please call us back._

Message 2: _Did you leave? Please, if you get these messages call us, or come back to the house._

Message 3: _You took us by surprise, sister, but if you come back we won’t hurt you. We understand. Andy is desperate to see you._

Message 4: _How did you find us?_

Message 5: _Please_. 

It’s a trick, it must be. She doesn’t bother listening to the voicemails. She’s not sure if they’d be able to tell if she did, and she’s honestly not sure why they aren’t knocking down her door—Booker, at least, should be able to track her with the phone, but then again maybe he’s not in a state to do so yet. 

She gets up and goes back to the bathroom. The bath is still full, water on the floor, vomit in the toilet. She flushes it and drains the tub, staring at herself in the mirror. Her hair is in disarray, creases from the sheets embedded in her cheeks. She tries to smile. It’s not anything close to frightening. 

She takes a shower and does not open her eyes or mouth to the water. She eats a granola bar and slowly drinks a glass of water. The phone rings three more times, and dings with two more texts, and an email coupon for a dispensary in Amsterdam. 

Message 6: _We understand you are angry but please give us a chance, for Andy._

Message 7: _Andy still has time left. If you come back we can figure things out. We’ve missed you._

She grits her teeth and listens to the first voicemail. Andromache’s voice, saying _Please, please_. She sounds desperate, and it makes her angry. She calls the number back before she can overthink it and Andromache doesn’t answer. Yusuf does.

“Quỳnh? Quỳnh, if this is you, please—“

“Tell her I will meet her at the cafe in the square tonight at seven. _Just_ her, understand? I will know if you or Nico or the other one is there, I will know if you have a gun on me, and I will leave this island and disappear. Understand? Just Andromache.”

She hangs up before he can get a word out and packs her bag, checks out of the hotel room, and takes the bus from the city center to the coast. The sea crashes against the cliffs and it hurts to see, hurts to hear. She’s on solid ground, but all she can think of is losing her footing and falling, sinking into the waves, held down by the currents and carried out by the tides. 

She throws the phone and the gun she stole from the Valletta apartment into the water and watches them fall. The waves are too wild to see when they sink. Then she retreats to a cafe where the scent of the sea is still too strong, but the sound of it has faded, and orders a coffee. Dark and strong. She sips at it and at first it sends nausea into her throat, and then comfort. A memory of a long-lost day, sitting in a sun-drenched square in Cairo with her family, sipping on coffee and eating zalabya, the sweet syrup soaking her fingers, the taste of it lingering on Andromache’s lips. That was only a year or two before they went to England. This tiny cafe in Malta so many years later is too different for her to really fall back into the memory, but if she closes her eyes and sips the coffee, almost, almost….

She takes the last bus back to Mdina and wanders the old, tight streets until evening. The sinking sun lights up the old buildings with an unreal glow by the time she makes her way to the town center, hanging back in the shadows of an alley while she surveys it. In reality, it would be easy for the others to be here, hidden in their own dark corners, perched on any of the buildings and watching her through a sniper’s scope. But she’s grown skilled at knowing when she’s being watched, and she doesn’t think she is. Not even by Andromache, who sits at a table outside the cafe, her back to her.

She stands for a moment, behind, unseen. A breeze ruffles Andromache’s short hair, leaving a few strands sticking straight up. The severe beauty of her profile remains unchanged, backlit by the sun. She wears sunglasses, and Quỳnh misses the sight of her eyelashes, which were always so long and dark, framing those grey-blue eyes. She imagines now that Andromache’s eyes might be closed as she looks towards the sun, eyelashes tinted golden as they brush against her cheekbones.

She approaches silently and takes the seat across from her. Andromache’s mouth twitches, though she doesn’t smile. 

“Take off those glasses,” Quỳnh demands, and the twitch turns into a full smile. Andromache slides them off and Quỳnh can’t stop her sharp intake of breath.

“Are you going to shoot me?” Andromache asks mildly, sipping from her drink. There are two glasses of water on the table, one in front of her and one in front of Quỳnh. She must have told the waiter she was meeting someone here. Her mouth is dry, suddenly. She takes a sip of water, holds it in her mouth, grounds herself. She is in control. She is here, now, and this swallow of water will not overwhelm her, it will quench her thirst. Andromache tracks the bob of her throat as she swallows and Quỳnh burns.

“No,” she replies, when she sets the glass down.

“It wasn’t very nice of you to do that to Joe and Nicky.”

“It was not very nice of Yusuf or Nicolò to leave me behind.”

Andromache’s expression shutters. “No. I suppose not. In that case, then, I deserve your bullet, too.”

She shakes her head. She cannot take her eyes off Andromache, off the curve of her lips, off the slender column of her neck where her pulse beats, off the strength in her wide shoulders. This creature in front of her, so strong and sure, as she always has been, but no longer invulnerable. It is incomprehensible, inconceivable.

Andromache’s brow creases and she makes an aborted movement across the table, like she was reaching for Quỳnh and thought better of it. Quỳnh burns for her touch. “You’re crying,” Andromache says.

“Oh,” she says, somewhat surprised. Her own fingers twitch and she gives in to her urges, stretching her hand across the table, palm up. Andromache looks at it, then up at her. The flicker of distrust in her eyes hurts, but is unsurprising. Andromache has never taken kindly to anyone hurting her family. Quỳnh is sure there is a similar look in her own eye—she hopes there is. She is Andromache’s oldest family, and she wants her to know that all is not forgiven. But this—this is a beginning. She cannot last much longer without touch.

Andromache sets her hand in Quỳnh's and twines her fingers around her wrist. Quỳnh follows her, feels the beat of her pulse under the pad of her thumb. It’s fast, but steady.

“I thought you were lost,” Andromache murmurs, almost too quietly to hear. She tightens her grip involuntarily, gripping Andromache’s wrist hard enough it will probably bruise, really bruise now. She can’t help herself.

“Why?” she chokes out eventually, and she doesn’t give any context—can’t, really—but Andromache, lovely Andromache who could always near read her mind, understands. There is only one real question, after all. 

Eyes downcast, she speaks slow. Deliberate. “We looked for years. We found every man who was on that ship, every person who stood at the harbor and watched it leave, all their families. We asked them all, forced them to tell us everything, dove where they said they dropped…where you should have been. We…killed most of them. I did, after we questioned them. And we questioned their families and their sons who sailed after them and searched for years. It…we only stopped when I was washed overboard, in a storm. Ended up on some island, didn’t make it back to Joe and Nicky for nearly five years. Nicky put his foot down. Said we would all be lost if we kept at it.”

“Nicky,” she says slowly, shaping her tongue around the unfamiliar, choppy sound of his new name. The guilt she’d felt at giving him two slow, drowning deaths evaporates.

Andromache’s eyes flash. “He was right. We were losing ourselves in our search, me especially. It took me five years to get back to them because I spent a year alone on that island, letting myself die of exposure again and again. I didn’t have the will to get up and move.” She sets her jaw. “I would not have my brothers lost, too.”

That hurts. “I was waiting for you.”

She lowers her eyes again. “I know.”

“How long?”

“Did we search? Nearly a hundred years, before I was lost. After, we still searched on and off, between jobs. Sometimes there would be a lead, or we thought there would be. It never led to anything, obviously. Sometimes I would take years away from Joe and Nicky, searching. But then…Booker.”

“You had to stay with him. Teach him.”

Andromache nods. “Not when we first found him. He wanted nothing to do with us. But…after he lost his family, we had to be there with him. Had to give him family, give him something to do with himself. And the wars…” she trails off, eyes far away. “The last centuries have not been kind, Quỳnh.”

“The centuries are never kind,” she snaps, because she will not take that as an excuse. Family, yes, love—that is an excuse. Not the endless horrors of humanity, though, which never really change. “There are ways, now. Technologies. You can look under the ocean floor. I read about them. You could have found me fifty years ago. Seventy. If you’d cared to try.”

Andromache’s eyes shine. Her voice cracks when she speaks again. “Quỳnh. We tried. We tried with the technology, with every new invention that came up.”

“You tried,” she repeats, and her voice sounds cruel and mocking, even though she doesn’t mean for it to.

Andromache grips her hand. “We never stopped searching. I swear to you. _I_ never stopped.”

She swallows. Grips the glass of water so tightly she’s afraid it might shatter in her hands, takes a small, slow sip. 

“I would not have wanted you to lose yourself,” she manages eventually.

“I know,” Andromache nods.

“Or them.”

“Yes.”

“But I was waiting.”

“I know.”

“I thought I could get free, before I went in. I—“ her throat closes around the words and she swallows convulsively, feeling saltwater on her tongue, in her stomach. “But then, in the water,” she forces out. “It was—I didn’t have any _time_ , I was drowning and freezing and hardly any time between the two, and I was so _scared_ , and then just…tired. Even when the coffin rotted away and there wasn’t anything real holding me anymore, I just couldn’t.”

Andromache’s eyes are wet, but no tears escape. Unlike Quỳnh, who’s cheeks are wet. The tears are saltwater against her lips, the wet heat of them an ugly memory, threatening to send her over the edge. She can’t even eat salty food, the taste of it so horrible it sent her gagging to the nearest toilet the first time she ate a simple cracker. 

“It wasn’t your job to free yourself,” Andromache whispers. “It was ours, and we failed you, and I will never forgive myself for it.” She reaches forward, towards Quỳnh's face, as though to brush her tears away, but she can’t—she can’t stand the thought of the touch, and she leans away. Andromache snatches her hand bck like she’s been burned, tugging her other hand, too, but Quỳnh tightens her grip. Andromache’s fingers in her own are the only thing anchoring her to reality. 

“I haven’t forgiven you,” she whispers.

Andromache shakes her head. “And you shouldn’t. I lost a soldier.”

“Just a soldier?” It sounds pleading, pathetic. It sounds like much more than the words themselves, which, of course, it is.

Andromache shakes her head. “A soldier. The woman I love. My other half. My miracle.”

_My miracle_. It’s what Andromache called her when she first found her, when she had been alone for so long she was sure she was the only one in the world to be cursed with immortality. She would still call her that sometimes, through the ages, when she was feeling especially tender, when they were alone together in the dark.

“I will forgive you,” she says, for lack of anything better to say. The words crowd her mind, claw up her throat and threaten to spill out, but she doesn’t know how to say any of it, really. How to say _I missed you so much the pain of it was worse than the drowning_. How to say _the only thing I really wanted when I came out of the water was you_. How to say _I’m sorry I hurt you, I’m sorry for my anger, but I needed somewhere to put it_. How to say _I don’t know if I can stand to watch you die, but I want to be next to you while you live._

“Quỳnh,” Andromache whispers, tightening her grip until it hurts. “Beloved, come home with me. Please.”

Her fingers tremble around Andromache’s. All this, she realizes—all this, and all she ever needed to do was find Andromache and touch her hand. Hear her voice, see her pulse beat in at her neck and feel it beneath her fingertips. Just that, and she’s home. She doesn’t even need to go anywhere. She could sit here at this table forever, the world moving around them, and it would be all she needs.

She could have had this from the very beginning, none of the pain, none of the struggle. No sitting on that island in the Netherlands, haunted by the sound of the sea. No Booker, none of his blood or tears. No bullets. She needed all that, though, to quiet her anger, for this moment to succeed. This moment where she stands and pulls Andromache up with her, tugs her close, and kisses her—right out there in the open, in front of the whole square. Her arms wind around her waist, pressing them together, and finally, _finally_ that part of her that went missing five hundred years ago and left a hollow place in her chest slots back into place.

Andromache makes a small noise in the back of her throat and all the stiffness melts away. She sags against Quỳnh like she’s lost all the strength in her legs and kisses back with bruising force, desperate and hungry.

Quỳnh takes her weight happily, and when she feels the wetness of Andromache’s tears against her own cheeks she doesn't say a thing, just pulls her closer.

* * *

Andromache drives them back to the house, one hand still firmly gripping Quỳnh's. When they enter, Nico and Yusuf look up from where they’re huddled at the dining table, heads bent together. Yusuf smiles at her, all warm brown eyes and laugh lines. Nico just watches her, pale gaze following her every movement. Well, so. Nico does not trust her and she does not trust Nico, would barely trust Yusuf not to turn on her in a second, certainly has no trust in the new one. The only thing she trusts is this: Andromache’s hand in hers, the beat of her pulse, the sound of her voice.

“Quỳnh will stay with us,” Andromache declares. “We can all talk tomorrow.” Then she pulls Quỳnh through the kitchen and into a back bedroom, small, a little cramped between the bed and chest of drawers and boxes of old art supplies and sketches, half-finished canvases leaned up against the walls. She sees Andromache’s face, and Booker’s, and Nico’s, over and over again. And her own. Yusuf has painted her eyes like fathomless depths. She lets go of Andromache’s hand for the first time in over an hour and marches over to turn the canvas against the wall. 

“I forgot about that,” Andromache murmurs. “I’m sorry. We can move them if you want, to a different room.”

“No,” she says shortly, and turns back to Andromache, who sighs and sits heavily on the bed. A beat of silence passes between them as they stare at each other. She feels unmoored. After all this time, she’s home—and now what?  


“I haven’t been sleeping well,” Andromache says after a moment. She raises an eyebrow. Andromache rolls her eyes, the expression so familiar and endearing it almost makes her tear up. “Yeah, I know, you probably haven’t either.”

“I didn’t sleep at all,” she said. “I never dreamed of Booker until I was out of the water, you know.” 

Andromache looks briefly shocked, then smoothes her expression over quickly. She is still hiding so much, but Quỳnh can see underneath it to the torrential emotions below. Andromache is trying to be strong, for her, for all of them, as she always is—but she tired. She is crumbling apart. She crosses the room to stand over her, runs her thumb ever so gently over the dark circles under her eyes. She doesn’t say anything—she finds she has very few words now, after so long unable to speak. Andromache understands her anyway. She always has.

Andromache tips back onto the bed, slides up until her head hits the pillows. Quỳnh crouches by her feet and takes off her boots, gently, gently, and then her own. She crawls up on the bed to lay facing her. They don’t touch, aside from Quỳnh's fingers on Andromache’s face. Tracing her features, terrifyingly familiar and nearly forgotten all at once. Andromache closes her eyes after a moment and lets her run her fingers over the shells of her ears, down the side of her neck, over the protrusion of her collarbone. The warm beat of her blood under skin. The ghost of her breath against her fingers. 

After a long while, Andromache lifts her own hand. Quỳnh flinches slightly despite herself and Andromache freezes, hand hovering in the air over her cheek, eyes deep pools. 

“May I?”

She lets out a breath and nods. Andromache’s hand brushes her cheek, strokes to her temple. Unlike her, Quỳnh keeps her eyes open, drinking in the sight of her. Gradually, her own hand stills on Andromache until it’s resting against her neck, thumb just brushing her jaw. Her eyes droop without her consent and it takes more and more effort to open them. Andromache’s eyes are closed again, though she still strokes Quỳnh's features like she’s trying to see her blindly. 

She falls asleep to the feel of Andromache’s breath on her cheeks and the touch of her rough fingertips skating over the curve of her nose.

* * *

And wakes, a few hours later, from the depths of a nightmare. Back in the coffin, drowning in the dark. She’ll probably never sleep easy again. Next to her, Andromache is dead to the world, her hand lying slack on the pillow next to her face. She looks young and vulnerable asleep, the hard lines of features carved by grief and exhaustion smoothed, lips parted slightly. She is not young, but she is vulnerable—clearly exhausted. She wonders if they lose their energy differently once they lose immortality—the perpetual shadows under Nico’s eyes always made him look tired, but he and all the rest of them never seemed to need the amount of food or rest that anyone else living their lifestyle would. Healing from devastating or extended injuries always took a lot of energy, but after a solid night of sleep everyone was always back to normal. What would weeks or months of insomnia do to Andromache now that she’s mortal?

She doesn’t wake when Quỳnh shifts, when she stands up from the bed and prowls to the door, looking down the hallway. The only sound is a gentle patter of rain on the roof. Light spills into the hall from the door to the kitchen, and she instinctually wants to avoid it, but she knows she won’t fall back asleep and she doesn’t want to wake Andromache with her restlessness. 

She ducks back into the room and sheds her red coat, which she never took off before falling asleep. A crumpled duffle on a box in the corner of the room spills Andromache’s meagre wardrobe. She digs through it until she hits a soft black sweater and shrugs it on. It smells like laundry detergent and a little like sweat and underneath that, like Andromache—the spicy scent that’s clung to her for eons, the scent Quỳnh would know any time, anywhere. 

She pads to the kitchen. Yusuf stands at the stove, watching over a kettle that’s nearly boiled, steam rising around his face. She slips in silently, but he still turns to her and offers a small smile. 

“Tea?” he offers. She inclines her head to accept and he pulls another mug out of the cupboard and fills a tea strainer with dark leaves. 

“You are not angry with me?” she asks him when he sets the mug in front of her. “You trust me enough to sit with me like this after what I did?”

He smiles again, wryly, and sits down in front of her. “I’m angry,” he says. “I did not enjoy watching Nicky die excruciatingly in front of me, I did not want Nile’s first experience of being shot in the neck to be at your hands, I’m angry you left without any further explanation after attempting to kill Andy. And I don’t really trust you, I suppose, but I’m still glad to see you, glad you came back, glad to share some tea with you.” 

She eyes him. “You are far too kind for your own good.”

He smiles again, crows feet deepening. “You did always use to tell me that. But the way I see it, I could be angry, which I was when you left—I wanted to go after you and shoot you myself—but my anger won’t do anything right now.” His face falls slightly. “And it’s difficult to be angry at someone you spent such a long time missing, especially when it’s your fault they weren’t found.”

She takes a sip of tea. Delicious and perfectly brewed, the way it always was when Yusuf made it. She does not challenge what he said, because he’s right—this isn't her fault.

“What I would like to know,” he says slowly, cupping his mug between his palms, “is why. Why didn’t you come find us sooner, why did you do what you did to Booker, why did you try to kill Andy?”

“I’m angry with you,” she answers after a moment. “All of you. You left me there. I wanted to hurt you back. As for the rest, Booker was easier to track than you all were. He was always in the same place, and you were always moving around. For a long time, I only saw you with Nile. I thought Andromache and Nico might be dead.”

A faint wince passes over Yusuf’s face at the very thought. “Nile stopped dreaming of you in the water. We thought…well, I think we all thought you’d died, maybe, but there was a hope…we split up, Andy and Nicky followed some leads and I stayed with Nile so she wouldn’t be alone. We followed a lead Copley had and then ended up busting a human trafficking ring and making enough of a scene we needed to lay low for a bit. Andy joined back up with us in Oslo, and we went to Philadelphia to run a quick job while Nicky tied up some loose ends in Lagos. Then we all met back up here. The idea was to take a break, to stop Andy from running herself ragged and killing herself in her grief.”

“Nile didn’t see me on the island, or with Booker?”

Yusuf shrugs. “She might have thought those were just dreams. The kid has a lot of nightmares. You remember what it’s like at the beginning.”

She snorts, surprised at the sound of it coming out of her. “The nightmares never go away.”

He smiles again. “No.”

“Why aren’t you asleep?”

He laughs. “Nightmares. I didn’t want to wake Nicky. He didn’t get much sleep while he was gone. Too much time on the tops of buildings with his rifles to keep him company.”

“You two are as strong as ever, I imagine.”

“He is my everything,” Yusuf says solemnly, and finally takes a sip of his tea. 

“I have a right to be angry,” she says, once enough time has passed she deems he isn’t going to start waxing poetic. It’s not as though he needs to; she of all people understands. “Booker called me crazy, but I am angry.”

He takes a sip of tea. “Of course you are.”

“Andromache told me it was Nico who called off your search for me.”

His eyes narrow. “We all agreed, and we never stopped searching for you, we only stopped letting it dictate our entire lives. Do not hurt him again for your perceived blame. We should all take your blame.”

She laughs. “Still as protective as ever.”

He meets her gaze. “Nico is the kindest of us all. He saw we would all end up like you if we continued on the path, and then what? Who would be left to search?”

She doesn’t have an answer to that. He’s right, and so was Nico, and so is she.

“I will be angry for some time, I think,” she says to him and he nods. 

“But you’ll stay?” he asks after a moment. 

She shrugs. “For now.”

He leans back in his chair and sighs. “While she’s still here.”

“Yes.” She does not think, she cannot think, of what to do with herself when Andromache is gone. What place in the world will be left for her?

“Quỳnh,” Yusuf says, setting his mug down on the table with a thump. “Sister, may I please hug you?”

She thinks about telling him no, because she still does not trust him, she still does not feel at ease sitting here with him in the dark. But then she thinks of the way Andromache felt in her arms, so warm and alive; and she remembers Yusuf’s hugs, the warmth of his arms as he lifted her from the ground and spun her around, laughing. She nods and he surges up from his chair like he’s barely been holding himself back the entire time, rounding the table to her side. She rises to meet him and he sweeps her up, buries his face in her shoulder, squeezes tight. His curls tickle her neck, her cheek, and she feels the rumble in his chest—he’s laughing. His tears wet her skin.

“Everyone crying,” she murmurs, thinking of Andromache and herself in the square earlier, and he squeezes tighter. She closes her eyes. She spent so much time imagining this in the coffin, after she was free. From the first moment she heard his voice in her dreams, saw the flash of his fingers, she was waiting for this moment.

“You’re here.” A ragged voice from the door pulls them apart. Andromache stands there, half in shadows, gripping the door frame. 

“Yes,” she says, confused.

“I woke up and you—you weren’t—I thought I’d dreamed it all.”

_Oh_. Foolish of her to leave like that. Yusuf lets her go and she crosses the room to Andromache, takes her hand, pulls her into the light. “I’m here.” Andromache grips her like a lifeline. Yusuf retreats from them slightly, leaning up against the counter.

“I didn’t think. I didn't want to wake you, but I should have stayed.”

“No, I—it’s okay, I just wasn’t sure.” She reaches out a hand, touches her cheek like she’s checking she’s real. 

“You should go back to sleep.” The dark circles are, if possible, even deeper against her pale face. “You are still tired.”

Andromache sighs, scrubs a hand over her face in a gesture so disgruntled and familiar it nearly brings her to tears again. “Don’t think I’ll be able to, now.” Her eyes flick over to Yusuf, standing by the stove, the kettle behind him. “Maybe you should make a pot, Joe.”

He smiles, turning back to the stove, and Andromache drops down into a chair with a tired huff. Quỳnh returns to her seat next to her. Andromache takes a sip from the cold dregs in Quỳnh's mug and grimaces. Outside, the rain picks up, drops beading on the window. Yusuf brings a pot to the table and sets it in the middle to steep, slides a mug over to Andromache, takes his own seat again. Under the table, Andromache reaches over to twine their fingers together.

“Well,” she says after a long moment of silence where nobody seems to know what to say. “We have all night. You might as well catch me up on what I missed for the last five hundred years.”

Andromache shakes her head and shuts her eyes, exhaustion weighing heavy. Yusuf huffs a laugh. “What’s there to say? A few dozen wars, a hundred languages lost, whole peoples and cultures wiped out. Entire continents pillaged. A whole lot of books published. A few notable paintings. A man walking on the moon. Billions dead, many more billions born.”

“As it ever was.”

He inclines his head. “As it ever was. You missed the Booker saga, of course, and if you thought Nico and I were difficult when you first found us, that stubborn idiot is a whole other level…”

She reaches over, pours the tea for them all. “Tell me.”

“Well, I have to start with Napoleon, then…”

Andromache’s hand in hers. Yusuf’s voice, the way he tells stories, hands waving, words weaving a picture she can see. The warmth of tea in her mouth, her belly. The rain outside, the creak of the old house, the faint sound of Nico snoring a few rooms away. She remembers that dream, early on, of Nile and Yusuf in a warm kitchen, laughing together. How angry she was. Light glints off Yusuf’s rings as he waves his hand. Andromache inches closer to her, until their shoulders and arms are pressed together, a warm line at her side, the shape she was missing for so long.

She lets herself relax, bit by bit, carried away by Yusuf’s voice and Andromache’s touch. She closes her eyes and steeps herself in her family, and for the first time in forever, she does not think of the sea.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry I went AWOL! Life and other projects are kicking my ass.
> 
> I'm on [tumblr!](https://prevalent-masters.tumblr.com)


	4. we search the other shore for some crossing home

It’s months—over a year—before anything happens. Or rather, before _it_ happens. The inevitable. Before Andromache nearly dies in front of her, before a bullet rips through her shoulder and it bleeds and it bleeds and it bleeds. She doesn’t move fast enough to block the shot and neither does anyone else, and she’s kneeling on the floor crying over Andy and trying to push the blood back into her body as Andy tries to comfort her—her! She’s not the one who needs comfort—mind back with Lykon as his lifeblood pooled around him, as he slipped away. 

Joe has to pull her off Andy to let Nile get to her, to patch her up. She screams at him, beats at his chest with her fists, tries to throw him off her, but he holds her fast. He whispers reassurances in her ear that she can’t hear through her own cursing. And when Andy finally sits up, grimacing, shoulder tightly wrapped, blood already seeping through the bandage, she tears herself away from Joe and falls to her knees in front of her.

“I’m okay,” Andy says, pulling her into the warm circle of her arms. She buries her face in her neck and breathes her in and thinks, _you’re not, you’re not, nothing is okay, nothing will be okay ever again_. She doesn’t realize she’s crying until Andy wipes the tears from her cheeks and cups her face in her hand and kisses her softly on her lips, her temple, the tip of her nose. She doesn’t stop crying until long after they’re back at the safe house, a tiny apartment a city away, and she’s slumped on a hard folding chair next to the tiny bed in the bedroom. The others are out in the kitchen and living room, sprawled on the couch, or, in Joe's case, the floor in front of the barely-working radiator. Andy told her not to be stubborn, to just get on the bed, but she was falling asleep as she said it and Quỳnh hadn’t wanted to disturb her. She would have been wrapped around her to fit on the mattress, she would have woken with a nightmare soon enough and probably jostled Andy enough to hurt her further when she did. 

So she slumps in the chair and tries to keep herself awake. Something horrible will happen, she feels, if she allows herself to sleep. She’ll wake and Andy will be feverish, insensate, this wound turned sceptic, the way countless mortals have died over the years right in front of them. Or she’ll wake and Andy will just be dead, gone without a goodbye. Someday, that will be what happens, even if not today. The thought sends ice down her spine, keeps her awake and blinking into that horror the future holds.

Nicky taps on the door frame after some time and passes her a steaming mug. She breathes in deep. Coffee.

“Thank you,” she says, and settles deeper into the blanket wrapped around her, not taking her eyes off Andy. He doesn’t respond, just drags another folding chair to sit at the other side of the bed with a sigh. Keeping vigil. Nicky is always the one to do that. 

They circled around each other for over a month after she joined them in Malta, like two wild animals wary of one another, sharing a too-small range. When Nico entered a room, she left it. When she walked in on him and Yusuf cuddled on the couch or cooking together, he put himself between them and eyed her warily, but rarely spoke. They were always too much alike in that way, wary and willing to hold a grudge for far too long. Nevertheless, he used to be quicker to trust than her, and far kinder. She didn’t feel any of that kindness, then.

And then, after too many long weeks, she woke from a regular nightmare and left Andromache to her slumber. No one else was awake, she thought, the house shrouded in darkness. She walked into the living room and he was there, curled up on the couch. Weeping.

“Nico?” She asked, and he looked up at her, moonlight glinting off the tear tracks on his cheeks.

“It’s my fault,” he said. “It’s my fault we didn’t find you.” He hid his face in his hands like he couldn’t bear to look at her. “I thought you must have died, and we didn’t know you hadn’t until Booker. And you were there for so long, living, drowning, and I told them we had to stop looking.”

She was tired, then. So tired. She still couldn’t stand the touch of water against her skin, the taste of salt. She would have given her own immortality in a heartbeat if it meant she could sleep through the night. The way her thoughts crowded her head, circling like flocks of unsettled birds—most days she still thought she must be crazy. 

But there in the darkness with Nico crying on the couch, there was no anger left. Their lives were finite after all, their time all together even more. And here she had her brother back in front of her after so long, the brother who’s hair she used to braid, who she taught to make long noodles and enjoy the taste of chilis, fire on his tongue. The brother who shot arrows with her far beyond the need for training, for the sheer joy of hitting target after target, farther and farther away, laughing and egging each other on. The brother she missed under the waves, the brother who left her behind to save the rest of her family, and who, of course, never really left her behind at all. And she understood then that his avoidance, his wariness, came more from guilt than anger.

She crossed the room and went to her knees in front of him, taking his cold hand in her own. 

“I killed you twice,” she said.

“You killed Joe,” he emphasized, never so concerned with his own life as with all the rest of theirs. 

“I killed you both. I’m sorry. Will you forgive me for that, if I forgive you?”

He looked at her, fingers tight in her own. “Yes.”

“Will you forgive yourself, if I forgive you?”

His fingers twitched. “It may take me a bit longer for that.”

“I haven’t been fair to you. We should have talked to each other. I missed you. I was angry, but I still missed you, even this last month while we’ve been in the same house.”

He let out a low sound, somewhere between a groan and a sob, and pulled her up onto the couch with him, wrapping her in his arms. She flinched at first, and he made to let go, but she pressed closer, burrowing into the warmth of him, his broad shoulders, his big hands. The next morning, Yusuf and Andromache found them tangled together, asleep on the couch, and Yusuf made some quip about Quỳnh stealing his man, and Andromache rolled her eyes, and for the first time things felt easy again, like they used to. Nico followed her like a shadow for the rest of their time on Malta, hardly ever more than a pace or two away; and every time she spoke he looked at her like she was some sort of miracle. Which, she supposes, she was.

Now, she sips at the coffee he made her, eventually gets up enough energy to ask the question that has nagged at her since she first saw him again, that she kept unsaid through the weeks when they circled each other like feral cats and the months of relearned trust.

“You don’t wear the cross anymore,” she says, nodding towards his neck where the leather cord and small wooden cross used to hang. He’d had it since she and Andromache first knew him, though he didn’t wear it for the first century or so. It was a gift from Yusuf, to replace one he’d had since birth, torn from his neck and thrown into the desert shortly after they’d stopped killing each other, after they’d left the burning remains of Jerusalem for which his people were responsible. He’d hung it around his neck again around the time the great plague swept across Europe and worn it ever since.

He glances down, almost surprised, then looks back up, a faint smile on his face. “I haven’t worn it in a long time.”

“You still have it?”

He nods. “It was a gift from Joe,” he says simply, which is all the explanation needed.

“Why?” she asks, a few minutes later. Nicky hums. “Why don’t I wear it?”

She nods. He hums again, eyes far away. It’s something she’s always loved about Nicky, how he thinks before speaking. It feels as though every single word is a gift meant only for you.

“When we lost you,” he says slowly, then flicks his eyes up briefly to meet hers, to gauge her reaction, she knows. She nods at him, though a pit still opens in her stomach whenever anyone alludes to her time in the water. 

“When we lost you,” he repeats himself, then continues. “We thought you would die. Truly die, and not come back. Surely, even one of us could not survive…could not survive _that_ for eternity. Perhaps we had to think that, when we stopped looking. We couldn’t have lived with ourselves if we didn’t.”

He looks down at his lap, where his fingers twist together, guilt heavy in the lines of his face. She has forgiven him—mostly—but she wonders if he will ever forgive himself. Wonders if he ever should. 

“It was horrible, to think of you lost forever,” he continues, “but it was better than the alternative. That you were still down there, suffering. I thought God could not possibly be that cruel. We had been afforded this escape from death and I could not think God could allow one of us to suffer like that, not after choosing us over and over again to live.” He huffs a laugh, self deprecating and broken. “Even after all I’d seen, even after what I’d done with my own two hands in God’s name, I still believed in mercy.

“But then,” he continues, and lifts his gaze to look at her fully. “Then we found Booker. And he dreamed of you the first night we were with him, dreamed of you drowning, and we knew that we were wrong. That you were still alive. That we had failed you. It killed Andy. She couldn’t eat, couldn’t drink. Nothing would stay down, so she starved. I couldn’t believe anymore, after that. I couldn’t wear the cross.”

“And now? Nile, she wears one. She believes.”

Nicky tilts his head. “She is young.”

“Yusuf prays when he can, when we are not on missions, the same as he did when you met.”

“Yes. I pray, Quỳnh, but I don’t find it fitting to wear the cross these days. Truthfully, I haven’t thought about it much.”

She thinks of the long lists of bombings and burnings, of shootings and stabbings, of wars and the empty reasoning behind them; all of which she’d read through during those days in Nes. “People still do terrible things for their faith,” she says.

“They always have,” he says solemnly, and he, of all people, would know. “That’s not why I don’t wear it, though. I still believe that mostly it is a force of good. It comforts people. It gives them meaning, belonging. That’s important.”

“Is that why you still pray?” she asks him. “To find meaning?”

He shrugs. “Maybe. It’s more habit than anything, I think. Even when I didn’t truly believe, I prayed. Now, I don’t know if I believe, but I still pray. It gives me something to talk to, to reason with. And…I still believe that it cannot have been random happenstance, that we are like this. Perhaps what I once called God I now call destiny.”

“You would call it destiny that Andromache is dying?” she asks, and her voice is sharper than before, though she hadn’t meant it to be.

Nicky meets her gaze steadily. “Would it make it better or worse if I said yes?”

She sighs, and looks away first. “It would not make a difference. It would not change it.”

“No,” he agrees softly. Silence falls again. She sips her coffee. She watches Andy, the steady rise and fall of her chest. Her cheeks are flushed, her hand curled by her chin. She doesn’t look injured, and in truth, it was not a major injury at all. It didn’t make the sight of her blood any easier.

“She’s tired, Quỳnh,” Nicky murmurs eventually. “I don’t think she is so sad about it, besides the fact that it means leaving us behind. Leaving _you_ behind.”

She knows this. She sees it in her eyes, in the way she holds herself. She was tired before, and now she is exhausted. 

“If you are right about God, or about destiny,” she tells Nicky, “they are both cruel. The timing is terrible. We deserve five hundred years before she goes. That, or I go with her.”

“Yes,” Nicky agrees. “I think if there is one thing I am sure of after being alive for so long it is that God, or destiny, is very cruel. But also very beautiful. You found her in the first place, after all.”

She can’t argue with him on that point, and she senses he doesn’t have much left to say. She sets the half-empty mug on the side table, takes Andromache’s hand, and lays her head down on the mattress. Nicky stays, sipping his own coffee, scrolling through something on his phone. Keeping vigil. She lets herself sleep.

* * *

Andy, to no one’s surprise, is a terrible patient. She’s up and out of bed, ready to leave the country two days later and tears her stitches in the process of trying to make herself coffee.

“I _told_ you,” Nicky groans. He’s redoing her stitches as she sits glowering on the toilet seat. “You can’t use that arm at all, Andy. It should _hurt_ too much for you to be using that arm, I do not understand why you have to be so—“

“So what?” Andy snaps at him. Quỳnh watches them from the doorway, arms crossed, an ache in her chest. She knows Andy doesn’t mean to play fast and easy with her now-fragile life. She knows she doesn’t mean to make Quỳnh feel left behind. She knows Andy would rather fling herself off a cliff than stop working and settle down while her family puts themselves in danger. She knows, and it still hurts. 

“So stubborn,” Nicky sighs, sitting back on his heels and looking up at her pleadingly. “You could think about…resting, a bit.”

“Resting,” Andy sneers. “Sure, Nicky. Big talk from the guy who never shuts up about _doing the right thing_ and _helping humanity_.”

If Nicky is hurt by her tone, he doesn’t let it show, just sighs and starts packing away the first aid kit. “We want you around for as long as possible,” he says. “That’s all I’m saying. You have something to stick around for.”

When Andy’s eyes flick up to meet her own, Quỳnh sees the flash of guilt. Andy opens her mouth, but she turns away before she can say anything.

* * *

The years slip past, both slow and unbearably fast. It’s December, around the winter festivals that are still important to Booker and Nile, so they’re taking a break, at a safe house in Hokkaido. Booker’s with them, just for a few days, visiting because Andy wanted him there. He and Quỳnh give each other a wide berth, but they can exist in the same structure these days. She’s chopping herbs for dinner, Nicky poking at something on the stove, Joe standing beside him with an arm looped around his waist. Nile and Booker are outside sparring with practice swords and swearing at each other loudly enough they can hear them in the kitchen. Andy sits at the wooden table, typing out an email to Copley. The first strands of silver shine in her dark hair and the wrinkles around her eyes have deepened, and she is stunning.

She’s distracted by Andy’s profile in the last golden light of the day, and she nicks her finger with the knife. Curses, because the blood ruined the pile of herbs and she’s not sure they have more. She turns to ask Nicky and he’s staring at her—staring at her finger, dripping blood on the flagstone floor.

“It’s just a nick—“ she starts to say, and then she realizes it still stings. 

“Oh,” she says, and Andy looks up, and her face crumples and before Quỳnh knows fully what’s happening she’s on her knees in front of her, hands pressing against her finger as though she can make the wound heal through sheer force of will. It’s a tiny cut, the bleeding already slowing, but the wound is there, a thin red line across the top of her finger. Nicky and Joe stand frozen next to them, Nicky's hand outstretched, Joe's eyes welling with tears.

“No,” Andy says, a streak of blood across her palm, tears on her cheeks. “No, you can’t.”

She thinks, distantly, she should be panicking. Angry. Scared. But instead, all she feels is a deep sort of relief, everything falling into place. The five hundred years stolen out from under them still makes her angry, still seems monumentally unfair. But perhaps Nicky is right about destiny. Andromache loses her immortality, Quỳnh finally surfaces from the sea. Andromache keeps fighting, because she is stubborn, and she is so good, and she survives. Quỳnh finds her way back to them. And of course she loses her immortality, too, because they have always walked through this world together, and they will walk out of it side by side. They still have years, and they will wring every drop of life they can out of every minute of them. She’s determined.

She extracts her finger from Andy’s grip and uses it to tip her chin up, until Andy meets her gaze. “Andromache,” she says. “Don’t cry.”

Andy shakes her head. “It’s too soon,” she says. “It’s too soon for you, after all that.”

She tugs at Andy gently, until she stumbles to her feet, swaying into her. She braces her weight with her body. She won’t let her fall. “This is what was meant to be,” she says, and Andy huffs a laugh into her neck. “You’ve been talking to Nicky too much.”

Nicky finally unfreezes, chokes out a laugh of his own, passes a shaking hand over his eyes. “The others,” he says. “I’m going to get them.” Quỳnh nods and he slips out of the kitchen, tugging a speechless Joe with him, leaving them alone, tucked into each other.

“Andromache,” she murmurs, tilting her head up, cupping her cheeks. She drops a kiss on her forehead, brushes lightly over her lips. “This isn’t the end. We have time. We have a lifetime together still, the kind of lifetime all mortals have. We were both young when we died the first time. Think of it, of the years we still have together. We can go back to my home, and to yours. Where we came from. We can travel without fighting. We could get a dog, or horses. Think of it, my love. A home, somewhere where you could ride every day if you wanted to.”

“Our family,” Andy croaks out, tears still trickling down her cheeks. She brushes them away with her thumbs. 

“We can help them when they need it, or when we want to. You can keep teaching Nile everything you know. You know they’d all step away and stay by our sides for however long it takes if we asked them to, but I think we can have both.” She lifts a hand from Andy’s cheek long enough to gesture around them expansively. “Look at this world we live in now. We can talk to them every day, we can get to them in a day no matter where they are. But please, Andromache—“ she tilts her head until their foreheads knock together, Andy hunched slightly to match her height, staring into her eyes. “Let’s not throw away these years together. Let’s spend them well.”

Andy breaks their gaze first, tucking her face back into Quỳnh's neck, still hunched over. “I can’t just stop what we do. Don’t ask me that, love. You know I can’t just sit in front of a fire and knit until I drop dead.”

The picture is so ridiculous she can’t help but laugh. “That’s not what I’m suggesting. I said, we can still work with them. But perhaps not every mission needs two old women tagging along, hmm? And traveling and riding and climbing all those mountains we never got to before isn’t exactly withering away in front of a fire, is it?”

Andy shakes her head, still tucked away in her shoulder. “Don’t call me an old woman.”

“Beloved. Look at me.”

Andy tips her head back, lifts her own fingers to trace over her cheekbones, her nose, her lips. She closes her eyes and basks in her touch. 

“I’m scared,” Andy admits softly. “I don’t know how to do this.”

She smiles. “We’ve both had a lot of practice dying.”

Andy’s fingers settle, cupping her cheek in warmth. “Not in staying dead.”

She opens her eyes and turns her face into Andy’s hand, kissing her palm. “I’m not afraid,” she says, because it’s true. “Not if I get to do it with you.”

And Andy closes her eyes, another tear trailing down her cheek, and kisses her, hard, desperate, the fear and love bleeding through her lips, in the way she holds her cradled like a fragile thing between her palms. “Just you and me,” she murmurs into her mouth.

And Quỳnh says, “Until the end.”

* * *

**Bridge through My Window**

In curve scooped out and necklaced with light

burst pearls stream down my out-stretched arms to earth.

oh bridge my sister bless me before I sleep

the wild air is lengthening

and I am tried beyond strength or bearing

over water.

Love, we are both shorelines

a left country

where time suffices

and the right land

where pearls roll into earth and spring up day.

joined, our bodies have passage into one

without merging

as this slim necklace is anchored into night.

And while the we conspires

to make secret its two eyes

we search the other shore

for some crossing home.

~ _Audre Lorde_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for sticking with me even though it's taken me forever to post this story! And happy New Year! May 2021 bring better things.
> 
> I have a [tumblr](https://prevalent-masters.tumblr.com) if you want to yell about The Old Guard more with me and give me fluffy prompt ideas to balance out all the angst.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on [tumblr!](https://prevalent-masters.tumblr.com) Please talk to me about The Old Guard I'm going feral.


End file.
